Brief Report: Assessment of Intervention Effects on In Vivo Peer Interactions in Adolescents with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD).

This study aimed to evaluate the effectiveness of a randomized controlled trial of a social skills intervention, the Program for the Education and Enrichment of Relational Skills (PEERS: Laugeson et al. in J Autism Dev Disord 39(4): 596-606, 2009), by coding digitally recorded social interactions between adolescent participants with ASD and a typically developing adolescent confederate. Adolescent participants engaged in a 10-min peer interaction at pre- and post-treatment. Interactions were coded using the Contextual Assessment of Social Skills (Ratto et al. in J Autism Dev Disord 41(9): 1277-1286, 2010). Participants who completed PEERS demonstrated significantly improved vocal expressiveness, as well as a trend toward improved overall quality of rapport, whereas participants in the waitlist group exhibited worse performance on these domains. The degree of this change was related to knowledge gained in PEERS.

Parent and family outcomes of PEERS: a social skills intervention for adolescents with autism spectrum disorder.

Raising a child with an autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is associated with increased family chaos and parent distress. Successful long-term treatment outcomes are dependent on healthy systemic functioning, but the family impact of treatment is rarely evaluated. The Program for the Education and Enrichment of Relational Skills (PEERS) is a social skills intervention designed for adolescents with high-functioning ASD. This study assessed the impact of PEERS on family chaos, parenting stress, and parenting self-efficacy via a randomized, controlled trial. Results suggested beneficial effects for the experimental group in the domain of family chaos compared to the waitlist control, while parents in the PEERS experimental group also demonstrated increased parenting self-efficacy. These findings highlight adjunctive family system benefits of PEERS intervention and suggest the need for overall better understanding of parent and family outcomes of ASD interventions.

Measuring the plasticity of social approach: a randomized controlled trial of the effects of the PEERS intervention on EEG asymmetry in adolescents with autism spectrum disorders.

This study examined whether the Program for the Education and Enrichment of Relational Skills (PEERS: Social skills for teenagers with developmental and autism spectrum disorders: The PEERS treatment manual, Routledge, New York, 2010a) affected neural function, via EEG asymmetry, in a randomized controlled trial of adolescents with Autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and a group of typically developing adolescents. Adolescents with ASD in PEERS shifted from right-hemisphere gamma-band EEG asymmetry before PEERS to left-hemisphere EEG asymmetry after PEERS, versus a waitlist ASD group. Left-hemisphere EEG asymmetry was associated with more social contacts and knowledge, and fewer symptoms of autism. Adolescents with ASD in PEERS no longer differed from typically developing adolescents in left-dominant EEG asymmetry at post-test. These findings are discussed via the Modifier Model of Autism (Mundy et al. in Res Pract Persons Severe Disabl 32(2):124, 2007), with emphasis on remediating isolation/withdrawal in ASD.

A replication and extension of the PEERS intervention: examining effects on social skills and social anxiety in adolescents with autism spectrum disorders.

This study aimed to evaluate the Program for the Education and Enrichment of Relational Skills (PEERS: Laugeson et al. in J Autism Dev Disord 39(4):596-606, 2009). PEERS focuses on improving friendship quality and social skills among adolescents with higher-functioning ASD. 58 participants aged 11-16 years-old were randomly assigned to either an immediate treatment or waitlist comparison group. Results revealed, in comparison to the waitlist group, that the experimental treatment group significantly improved their knowledge of PEERS concepts and friendship skills, increased in their amount of get-togethers, and decreased in their levels of social anxiety, core autistic symptoms, and problem behaviors from pre-to post-PEERS. This study provides the first independent replication and extension of the empirically-supported PEERS social skills intervention for adolescents with ASD.

Brief report: visuo-spatial guidance of movement during gesture imitation and mirror drawing in children with autism spectrum disorders.

Thirteen autistic and 14 typically developing children (controls) imitated hand/arm gestures and performed mirror drawing; both tasks assessed ability to reorganize the relationship between spatial goals and the motor commands needed to acquire them. During imitation, children with autism were less accurate than controls in replicating hand shape, hand orientation, and number of constituent limb movements. During shape tracing, children with autism performed accurately with direct visual feedback, but when viewing their hand in a mirror, some children with autism generated fewer errors than controls whereas others performed much worse. Large mirror drawing errors correlated with hand orientation and hand shape errors in imitation, suggesting that visuospatial information processing deficits may contribute importantly to functional motor coordination deficits in autism.

Stress enhancement of fear learning in mice is dependent upon stressor type: Effects of sex and ovarian hormones.

In three experiments, chronic stress enhancement of subsequent fear learning was investigated in C57Bl/6 mice. The first experiment focused on the influence of stressor type on subsequent Pavlovian fear learning. Male mice were subjected to 7d of either repeated restraint stress or chronic variable stress before undergoing a fear conditioning procedure with three tone-shock trials. Subsequent tests were conducted of contextual and tone fear, through measures of the freezing response. Repeated restraint altered pre-training activity and the unconditional response to shock, but was ineffective in influencing conditional fear. Chronic variable stress significantly inflated contextual fear without altering tone fear. In a second experiment, investigating potential sex differences in the fear-enhancing effects of stress, female mice were subjected to the very same procedures. Among females, chronic variable stress selectively altered tone fear, rather than contextual fear. A final experiment investigated the potential role of ovarian hormones by subjecting female mice to either ovariectomy or sham surgery before the stress procedures. Ovariectomy had no significant effect on the ability of stress to enhance fear in females. In sum, the experiments indicate that stressor type significantly influences subsequent fear learning, that males and females are differentially sensitive to fear enhancement by stress, and that the mechanisms mediating these sex differences lie outside of the immediate influence of ovarian hormones. The findings should allow for refinement of animal models of human psychiatric disorders and for further investigations into the genetic and molecular substrates of significant gender differences in fear and anxiety.

Mapping the literature of nursing education.

OBJECTIVES: As part of a project to map the literature of nursing, sponsored by the Nursing and Allied Health Resources Section of the Medical Library Association, this study identifies core journals cited in nursing education journals and the indexing services that cover the cited journals. METHODS: Three nursing education source journals were subjected to a citation analysis of articles from 1997 to 1999, followed by an analysis of database access to the most frequently cited journal titles. RESULTS: Cited formats included journals (62.4%), books (31.3%), government documents (1.4%), Internet (0.3%), and miscellaneous (4.6%). Cited references were relatively older than other studies, with just 58.6% published in the 1990s. One-third of the citations were found in a core of just 6 journal titles; one-third were dispersed among a middle zone of 53 titles; the remaining third were scattered in a larger zone of 762 titles. Indexing coverage for the core titles was most comprehensive in CINAHL, followed by PubMed/MEDLINE and Social Sciences Citation Index. CONCLUSIONS: Citation patterns in nursing education show more reliance on nursing and education literature than biomedicine. Literature searches need to include CINAHL and PubMed/MEDLINE, as well as education and social sciences databases. Likewise, library collections need to include education and social sciences resources to complement works developed for nurse educators.